Rowan's Rule: Rupert Shortt

Hodder & Stoughton £18, Times Books

It is a rare and welcome privilege to be given insights into the humanity of a figure in public office, particularly where that office is that of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Most insights into public figures and celebrities are stagemanaged.

The reverse is true in Rupert Shortt's biography of Dr Rowan Williams, a book not authorised by Lambeth Palace but written with the Archbishop's cooperation. While the Church of England is assiduous in managing the general news it releases about itself, and in this respect Lambeth Palace is no different, Shortt's book has more the sense of an unmediated release of previously unknown material about Dr Williams.

One of the most interesting but also saddest passages concerns the suicide of Lori Watson, a woman slightly older than Dr Williams, who suffered from depression and who became a friend of his while both were students at Oxford. Leaders, kings and archbishops are, as writers have known from Shakespeare onwards, at the confluence of the currents of public and private morality, and the strange, difficult dance that the one often has to do around the other.

In writing about this, and about the Archbishop's fascinating Welsh childhood and family history, Shortt opens a window onto his behaviour as a young man, but nonetheless the same man who stands before the world as Archbishop of Canterbury today. The resulting portrait is more sympathetic and balanced than that generally portrayed of a bearded, sometimes-eccentric figure who has had a difficult time making himself understood to the media and, as a result, the wider world. “If you were down on your luck, then, Rowan was your friend,” writes Shortt after describing the Archbishop’s willingness to trust troublesome priests who would later let him down. “He took gospel precepts on forgiveness very seriously indeed.”

In writing about the Sharia law lecture controversy that, to judge by the regular references the Archbishop has made to it in subsequent addresses suggests he feels deeply misunderstood, Shortt suggests: “The lecture clearly demonstrated his cleverness. What he did not demonstrate, though, was a capacity to see how his words would be received.”

What this, the passage about Lori's suicide and many others reveal about the future Archbishop is deeply encouraging in terms of insights into this sensitive, intellectual and complex figure considered possibly by some as more suited to an eremetic life of cloistered academia but whose witness as a man “other than” or “apart from” the materialism and consumerist ambition of so much of the British establishment, is one of which we are all surely in need. That Dr Williams himself fails to get his message across as clearly as his listeners would sometimes like is perhaps no personal demerit. Instead it should be read as a serious comment on a society that simply lacks the time needed to understand and contemplate the spiritual depths of a leader apparently reluctant to lead.

An ever-strengthening sense of suffering endured by the Archbishop pervades the latter half of the book as he is forced to deploy his fine, delicately tuned mind to grappling with the arcane intricacies of church-rendingly slow Anglican schism. He manages to escape for a few months last year to write his book on Dostoevsky, itself a masterpiece on the art of writing, faith and suffering that I am also reading in tandem with Shortt's book and which is worth every second of the five minutes it can take to get past one sentence.

At an afternoon tea party I attended recently in Hampstead, a leading establishment figure railed long and hard about how Dr Williams had far too fine a brain to be beaten up in the service of the Church of England and Anglican Communion. But had Dr Williams not become Archbishop, it is doubtful that either this book would have been written, or that his book on Dostoevsky would have received the recognition it merits. The Anglican difficulties are in their own way as complex as the man ordained by God to lead, and to serve. If the end of Shortt's book leaves the reader with a prevailing sense of sadness, that is perhaps because the last chapter has yet to be written. Dr Williams himself remains strong and cheerful. And that is because the faith that sustained him through Lori Watson's suicide, and which has pervaded his presence with a unique charisma all his adult life, remains true. The real clue to understanding the Archbishop is through the lens of belief. Perhaps it is because faith is on the wane in our society, that his voice often sounds like a voice in the wilderness. Shortt shows with commendable honesty why it is the world might judge and misunderstand, but leaves the reader with the discomfiting suspiscion that Jesus would surely approve.